RIO DE JANEIRO (AP) – After 1,192 days, Brazil’s run of hosting mega-sports events came to an end Sunday at the Paralympic Games.
It began with soccer’s Confederations Cup in 2013, extended to the 2014 World Cup, ran through IOC President Thomas Bach’s goodbye speech last month at the Rio de Janeiro Olympics, and finished with the closing ceremony of the Paralympics before 45,000 spectators at Rio’s Maracana stadium.
Awarded when Brazil was a rising economic power, the sports pageants focused unprecedented attention on the country – much of it unwanted.
As the shows went on, Brazil plunged into a deep recession. A billion-dollar corruption scandal buffeted state-run oil company Petrobras, and President Dilma Rousseff was removed from office in an impeachment trial just days after the Olympics closed.
“This all left a very mixed legacy,” Mauricio Santoro, an international relations expert at the State University of Rio de Janeiro, told The Associated Press. “We are going to need some years to evaluate what was the impact, the worth of these events for Brazil.”